Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective is the first U.S. mid-career survey of this important Dutch artist’s work in photography and video. Dijkstra came to prominence in the 1990s with her celebrated Beach Portraits, large-scale color photographs of children on the verge of adolescence posed on beaches around the world, from South Carolina to the Ukraine. From that point on, her sensitive and visually riveting portraits have documented individuals caught in transitional states, sometimes due to physical exertion, for example after giving birth or dancing, or charted over time through series. Along with other Western European photographers such as Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff, Dijkstra has been a leading innovator in the production of large-scale color images, which came to define contemporary photography in the 1990s and have transformed it ever since. This comprehensive retrospective will feature the Beach Portraits and other early works such as the photographs of new mothers and bullfighters, together with selections from Dijkstra’s later work. It also includes series that she has been working on continuously for years, such as Almerisa (1994–2008), which documents a young immigrant girl as she grows up and adapts to her new environment. Dijkstra’s work in video will be fully integrated in the exhibition.Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective is organized by Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Sandra S. Phillips, Senior Curator, Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition which runs June 29 - October 3, 2012, will be accompanied by the first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s work to be published in the United States.

About Me

My pictures explore the strange anthropology of cities. The unusual and overlooked in the human landscape.
I am asking the viewer to question the idea that photographs as documents are complete representations of subject.
I'm interested in the universality of life and the idea of parallel lives - when one thing is happening here, something else is happening over there. The democracy of non-places fascinates me, in the knowledge that inevitably nothing is as it seems.
I work and live between Auckland and Paris.
http://harveybenge.com/
email:harvey.benge@xtra.co.nz